Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev dies at 91

Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Russian leader who was instrumental in ending the Cold War, creating a more free and democratic society in his country and bringing an end to the Soviet Union, died Tuesday at 91, according to several Russian news agencies.

Russian news outlets reported that he died at Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow but did not offer any other details.

Gorbachev’s death comes months after Russia launched its war on Ukraine, which alienated Moscow from much of the world and brought about crippling Western sanctions that have rapidly transformed Russia’s economy.

Gorbachev assumed the head of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1985, working swiftly to modernize a lagging bureaucracy and seeking to restore the country’s international significance.

Gorbachev also sought more peaceful relations with the Western world, including with the U.S. In 1987, he and former President Reagan agreed in a historic pact to denuclearize intermediate range nuclear missiles.

He also oversaw the Chernobyl crisis in 1985. When the nuclear plant meltdown threatened to spread across Ukraine and the Soviet Union, he worked with scientific experts and advisers to limit the radiation, although the situation was still a historic catastrophe. The Chernobyl plant and the surrounding area were locked down for decades because of contamination, but is no longer considered a threat.

Gorbachev also supported Eastern European countries that wished to secede from the Soviet Union, promising them he would not intervene.

After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Gorbachev quickly worked to bring an end to the communist Soviet Union, ending 45 years of geopolitical tensions with the U.S. and the Western world, and leading many other countries to sever ties with communism across the world.

By the time he resigned on Dec. 25, 1991, the Soviet Union had collapsed.

“I was doing my best in bringing together morality and responsibility to people. It’s a matter of principle for me. It was high time to put an end to the rulers’ wild cravings and to their highhandedness,” Gorbachev told his foundation in published remarks.

“There were a few things I have not succeeded in, but I don’t think I was wrong in my approach,” he continued. “Unless this is done, one can hardly expect that policy can pay its unique part, especially now that we have entered the new century and are facing dramatic challenges.”

William Taubman, who wrote the first scholarly biography of Gorbachev, said the Russian leader was more complicated than what he is publicly known for.

“Gorbachev was more restrained, self-contained, at least in public, with a character harder to decode,” Taubman said in a 2018 interview with the National Endowment for the Humanities. “The fact that he was more of a mystery made writing his life more of a challenge and therefore, in some ways, more satisfying.”

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931, in Privolnoye, a village in southern Russia near the city of Stavropol. He was born to a peasant family, his father an agricultural mechanic and his mother a farmer on a state-run collective.

Gorbachev, who experienced German occupation of Russian land during World War II, was an avid reader, performed well in high school and was the first Soviet Union leader with a college degree to rule the nation since Vladimir Lenin, according to Taubman.

Gorbachev worked odd jobs in his youth, including as a combine harvester in 1945, but he had larger ambitions for himself. He enrolled in the Faculty of Law at Moscow University in 1950 before earning his degree in 1955.

That same year, he also married the love of his life, Raisa Maximovna Titorenko, who died in 1999. Gorbachev never married again.

Gorbachev was the first secretary for the Leninist Communist League of Youth of Ukraine from 1955 to 1960 before he became the organization’s leading official in Stavropol. He ascended to become a delegate for the Stavropol 22nd Communist Party Congress in 1961.

He went back to school from 1964 to 1967 at the Stavropol Agricultural Institute. In 1970, he was appointed First Secretary for the Stavropol Territory.

Having impressed leaders, he moved to Moscow to join the Communist Central Party Committee, the principal policy makers of the USSR, ascending first to the Secretary of Agriculture position before his appointment as general secretary in 1985.

His experience made him grow critical of the USSR, an opposition that grew after the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Upon his appointment, Gorbachev immediately replaced more conservative members of his cabinet with ones who were more aligned with his vision for change.

When he assumed power, he ended the Afghanistan war through a peace accord in 1988, promised not to intervene in satellite countries whose citizens vied for democracy, and withdrew forces from central Europe.

Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 for his foreign policy accomplishments.

At home, Gorbachev pushed for more democracy and free elections. His changes were unpopular among hard-line conservatives, who attempted to oust him from power in 1991 in a failed coup. Gorbachev responded by dissolving the Central Committee, and the Russian Federation eventually replaced the former communist bloc, with Boris Yeltsin becoming Russia’s first elected president.

Upon his resignation in December 1991, Gorbachev was praised as a hero by the world over. Gorbachev has long stood by what he did, writing in an essay published in August 2021 that he had accomplished perestroika, or the “restructuring” of the Soviet Union.

“We were able to wake up society, to do what all the previous years of perestroika were trying to achieve — to include the people in politics,” he wrote. “Free elections revealed many new, interesting people, clarified the positions of social strata, about which, as it turned out, we had a very approximate, and sometimes even distorted idea, formed under the pressure of political dogma.”

Following his long years of government service, Gorbachev founded a think tank called the Foundation for Social, Economic and Political Research. He also founded an independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta.

He did not speak publicly about the direction of the country under Putin; however, Newsweek reported that Gorbachev was distraught about the war in Ukraine and felt his life’s work was being undone by Putin.

In a 2011 interview with the Lyndon B. Johnson Foundation, Gorbachev said that Putin “inherited a difficult situation” from his predecessor, but said the Russian leader was “wrong” for using authoritarian methods.

“That I think is a mistake,” Gorbachev said. “Where you have leaders that rule for twenty years or more, you see what happens around them. The only thing that is important in such situations and for people around them is holding onto power. I believe this is something happening now in our country.”

From 1992 to 2008, Gorbachev traveled to 50 countries and conferred more than 300 awards, diplomas, and honorary certificates to people, and wrote several books.

In a 2019 interview with BBC News, Gorbachev said that when he was general secretary, he traveled to meet people across the Soviet Union who told him that although they were suffering, they could manage so long as he could ensure there was no war.

“I was stunned,” he said. “That’s how the people were. That’s how much they had suffered in the last war.”

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